Vision Pro and the Era of Spatial Computing

“So in some sense, we're not reinventing the wheel. We are creating, looking what people saw in the world of 2D and now bringing it to the world of 3D, but realizing that the infrastructure and the algorithms for content processing are so different and the content itself is really, really different.”

Chad Anderson:

Welcome to the Space Capital Podcast. I'm your host, Chad Anderson, founder and managing partner at Space Capital, a seed stage venture capital firm, investing in the space economy. We're actively investing out of our third fund with a hundred million under management. You can find us on social media at Space Capital. In this podcast, we explore what's happening at the cutting edge of the entrepreneurial space age and speak to the founders and innovators at the forefront.

So this is the Space Capital podcast, and today we are speaking with Alon Grinspoon, founder and CEO of echo3D, a 3D asset management platform helping developers manage and stream 3D AR/VR content. We invested in echo3D in the fall of 2021, and the company's backed by a great syndicate of investors, including Convoy Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Verizon, 5G Lab, and others. Alon, it's great to have you on the show today. I'm really looking forward to this. Thanks for joining us.

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for the invite. Super excited to chat.

Chad Anderson:

To kick things off, you know, could we start just with a bit about yourself and the history of the company, you know, why and how did you decide to found echo3D?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah. Oh, my favorite question. I'm talking about myself from, from, from the get go. Yeah, so I did my masters in computer science specializing in AR/VR, computer graphics at Columbia University. I did my undergrad in computer science, software engineering, focusing on cloud. So certified nerd and a big believer in the kinda intersection between 3D and cloud. Went to Columbia with my twin brother who went to Columbia Law. So once we graduated, we're like, we have to start a company and that kind of love for, again, 3D and cloud technology really resonated with us back in the day, did this really cool project at Columbia, which basically was AR for surgeries. We took CT and MRI scans, converted them into 3D models and then physicians were basically able to see the patient's heart floating above them during surgery. It was an amazing use case.

I got to scrub into I think dozens of surgeries that basically, you know, a physician would get a reference map of the patient's anatomy, but the problem there was that had to be something I really, really hate and that's waking up super early in the morning to be at the, OR at like 5:00 AM to swap out content. And I was like, there's no way. There's no way that if I wanna work with the hospital, I have to physically be there. Or if I wanna update an app, an engineer needs to be on the scene. And there was really no cloud solution to kinda do that, to swap content remotely, change things from the cloud and we said, okay, we're gonna solve that. We talked to over 300 developers validated this is a valid that's gonna issue and concern and said, yeah, we're gonna build a cloud for 3D.

Chad Anderson:

That's a great story. And so you founded the, with your twin brother, that's not your average sort of startup founding team, you know unique challenges or benefits of doing that?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, definitely benefits. You know, treating a startup as a family business in a sense, and also knowing that regardless of what happened, we disagree or whatnot. We can always talk to, you know, the superior arbiter, which is our mom, and she'll make sure that like, you know, everything's okay and everyone's aligned. I think that's a really good thing. And also specifically in our state, everyone is so obsessed with like digital twins and stuff like that and we're actual twins. I think that's really, really cool.

Chad Anderson:

Hilarious.

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, and we also added the another co-founder who's not our twin, but definitely kinda a brother from another mother looks very similar to us.

Chad Anderson:

I love it. Very tight-knit team. Can we talk about your product a little bit? I was watching a video of you at a developer conference recently, and I really appreciate how you addressed the crowd in terms of, you know, you were comparing the ease in which we have made it to manipulate and, and use and, and leverage 2D content and how 3D contents just, were just not there yet. And so you were drawing some parallels to just sort of drag and drop and how it's, its at the moment without echo3D, it's, it's quite complicated to do that with 3D content. Can you tell us a little bit about your product and what it is that that echo3D does?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, definitely. So echo3D is a cloud solution for 3D assets management. We basically provide tools and network infrastructure for companies and developers to process, convert, compress and stream 3D assets from the cloud. You can think of it almost as a aws like Amazon Web Services, but just for 3D as you mentioned, these things are basically these problems where be solved for 2D content for images and videos. You don't have to be a web developer to update a blog post. That's not the case. If you're building a, a multi massive game like something like Fortnite or you're building some AR experience to, you know, visualize a couch in your room, those assets are not that easily updated. And one of the things that we're seeing basically even back in the day when like Pokemon Go was all the rage for an example of an AR game, that having content stream in different locations rapidly for a large amount of users requires different solutions.

So in some sense, we're not reinventing the wheel, we are creating, kind of looking what people saw in the world of 2D and now bringing it to the world of 3D, but realizing that the infrastructure and the algorithms for content processing are so different and the content itself is really, really different. We'll talk about that a little bit more when we talk about the kind of space infrastructure, but the fact that the 3D asset could be 50 gigabytes large and it could be 17 files, skeleton, animation, mesh, all of them together can consist of one file and you somehow need to bring that into your device that only has a, you know, five megabyte buffer and you need to render that and all in kind of real time. How do you do that? So these are lot kinda technical challenges that you have to face today. We have over 65,000 developers on our platform. Usually they use Echo to build thanks for gaming or advertisements or training or data visualization if it's for game engines or mobile devices or even AR/VR headsets. And kind of in the last few weeks we saw the Apple Vision Pro kind of announced, which is great to kind of sign for the industry that the next iPhone, like the next kind of big device would be an AR/VR headset.

Chad Anderson:

Yeah, sure. And so we're at a pivotal moment for mixed reality. You are a bit early, you've been building here for several years and building on an, you know, a mixed reality platform before it's really taken off. So what have been the challenges, you know, in your go to market? What's been your strategy knowing that you're a little bit early here?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah. Oh that's a great question. So in our eyes, the go to market was really developer focused. Again, looking back at what people did in the past for developer tools, if it's something like GitHub or Segment, we saw a lot of companies trying to build initial traction with the kind of people who are drinking the same Kool-Aid around building applications. It's web then mobile, now 3D. So we did a lot of developer evangelism, a lot of hackathon sponsorships, a lot of kinda bottom-up work. A lot of kinda content marketing around AR and different or VR and different use cases. So like AR and surgery, VR and gaming. And then kind of bringing that into, into the fold. And you also reached out to a lot of professionals in the space that it's on LinkedIn or other networks to basically, hey, hey you can use our tech to build applications really, really fast.

We made sure our product, kind of our core key performance indicator was that you can build an app with echo in 15 minutes or less. The, and really kind of minimizing that time to deploy an app to show people that this shouldn't be that difficult. And then, and then just making sure that we can kind of engage developer where they exist in the wild. I think that's kind of when is the biggest challenge. And then the more time passes, you're seeing more and more companies kind of starting to drink that same Kool-Aid. You're seeing companies like Facebook rebranding to Meta literally in the title and leaning into Metaverse more than before you're seeing Apple releasing hard work. So now it's really great to see all these kinda titans of industry leaning into the space that we were gonna bidding on for a while.

Chad Anderson:

But it's kind of a chaotic period, right? I mean Facebook rebranded to Meta and then took a huge step forward doing that and then seems to have now sort of taken a couple of steps back and are kind of trying to distance themself. But at the same time, you know, Apple's coming out with their new headset and so they've released another, you know, sort of mixed reality headset. How are people supposed to make sense of what's going on right now seem, you know, given that it seems like these big tech companies are sort of getting in, they've got one foot in one foot out, what's really going on?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, well startups are obviously a rollercoaster on just ups and downs to the industry. I think there's a lot of trends going on. So in the beginning, the spotlight was really much about like kinda NFTs, then it moved to Metaverse, then it moved to generative AI. Now it's kind of back to spatial computing. That's kind of the new hashtag of the Apple define. I think the cool thing, if you kind of take a step back and look at these, these things of like bird's eye view, what, like the kind of line that connects all of them is 3D content. A lot of people who built NFTs sold them through tried before you buy experiences or like Facebook or like kind camera first applications. Then when you're even talking about generative AI selling, you're saying, oh, here's a way to generate 3D assets through a text prompt. And obviously kinda metaverse station computing are kinda core to kind of 3D. So I think that's why I'm super excited about this space that people are trying to approach the evolution of content from all these different kind of verticals. If it's through hardware, if it's through content, if it's through use cases. And we are really trying to build kind of the picks and shovels for that. So basically have that kind of cloud infrastructure that works across all of these kind of use cases and supports all of this hardware that's coming up.

Chad Anderson:

Definitely, I mean it, despite the up ups and downs, it's definitely going in one direction. So you've recently written some success stories of customers in certain areas like industrial models and e-commerce and things. And I saw you again talking about that at a, at a conference you've got 60,000 developers on your platform, you are a Unity verified solution. You know, you've got a Snapdragon, you know, you're building on a Snapdragon SDK. And I'm just sort of curious, you know, given your recent successes in some of these areas, you know, what, how are you feeling about where you're at and you know, what are you most proud of that you've achieved so far?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, oh, I love it. So, and it also kind of ties beautifully to, to the previous question. So I think the, the cool thing about kinda this industry is kind of that positive trend that you're seeing. And because again, we have that version view, what people are, are building, I'm super excited to see all these use cases. So back in the day when people, you know, were introduced to websites, it wasn't clear what you need a website for. And then, you know, developers started building and then you saw, oh, obviously you can use kind of websites to build a marketplace or a blog. Five years later you had the same thing with mobile apps. What do you need a mobile app for? And now like everyone has an app, Lady Gaga has an app, so kind of, or like obviously ride hailing or dating apps, were gonna emerge as a really kind of good use case.

So now we're in the same spot in 3D. People are asking, oh, what do you need a kinda 3D experience for? Or what do you need an app on the MedQuest or the Apple headset? And I'm super excited to kinda figure this out. I'm really excited to see how all these industries that you mentioned, like e-commerce and industrial use cases will inject kind of 3D into their industry. Think of it, even the example I gave in the beginning with the kind of medical kind of surgery example that is in a sense not an obvious use case. Would a physician wear a headset during surgery? But then you think about it that yeah, they're already wearing like protective gear sometimes and and like all this kind of like glasses. So, so why not have them kind of be cloud connected? So I think that's why I'm like super excited about, again, this industry that you're seeing that this is just a technology that can be used anywhere and every industry just needs to kind of figure out how to, how to use this technology for its benefit.

What I'm super proud of in general, kinda going back to your question, is the fact that we're able to build like a really, really strong core team simply here in New York that has this kind of inclination towards 3D and cloud. And again, it just like kind of like-minded people who, who love this kind of future that we're all built in towards. And actually, you know, love ar love vr and like there's no question about it when you, when you talk about like team members to see their excitement in that conference that you mentioned, we actually flew in that entire team and made that into like a team all hand and to see, you know, engineers and sales people all super excited about this industry and, and coming in from like such a good place that we are literally building kind of the next technology that will revolutionize the world, I think is really inspiring.

Chad Anderson:

I love it. Okay, so this is a good time I think to address the elephant in the room. This is the Space Capital podcast and we're a venture firm that invests in the space economy. So what does this have to do with space? You know, I think there's a few things holding AR back from mainstream adoption, precise positioning, you know, sort of especially in urban canyons and where a whole lot of people are real time streaming and particularly in rural areas and places where there's, there's low connectivity or low bandwidth and a viable interface. Which we've touched on a couple, you know, apple and and meta already, but I want to kind of touch on each of those quickly and and get your thoughts on them. In the GPS playbook we explore how companies like Trimble and Garmin harnessed the signal from satellites that were built for the government and military, which unlocked location based services and made satellite technology ubiquitous in our everyday lives.

And AR is one of the first sort of next generation applications that's offering a new layer of experience for location-based services. But to realize the full potential of AR and enhancements in positioning are needed. You know, they need to persist in the real world across space time and devices. You know, without precise location, digital information won't properly mesh together. So a number of companies are focused on better positioning in the space realm, right? Some are focusing on better signals from orbit, they're launching new satellites and things. We've got folks augmenting and enhancing the signal on earth trying to remove errors from the GPS signal, you know, putting relays in. And we've got computer vision and GPS combining, although, you know, GPS still provides a sort of valuable constraint to the target area. This is a, an area in which positioning is is super important to AR and, and realizing AI's future, you know, how much of a constraint is that for you now? How much of that's being solved and you know, do you think that's a, an issue?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, well love it. I think you kind of covered basically the three big things that kind of you know, intersecting space technology and what we do in the world of 3D and Metaverse. So one is definitely the location and positioning part. If you're seeing a lot of these experiences, I think again, Pokemon Go that I mentioned was kinda a prime example of a location based, position based experience and then realizing, oh, all these experiences are very different than a website or a mobile app. Suddenly the content is contextualized in our world and our position and that needs to be updated rapidly and that needs to be updated in different kind of locations. And we also literally have kind of this digital toilet invisible layer of content on top of our actual position. So that's something that definitely kind of ties into space technology and understanding that like where are your users, literally physically in our case, a lot of the kind of server optimizations that we do it then we, if we realize that you have a massive amount of users, let's say in authentic, we will actually have to hook up a server and substantiate a server in Austin so they'll get the fastest kind of streaming and the, the best performance because of their location.

So I think that's kind of paramount to kinda understand user locations more than effort before. And the second part is definitely kind of the infrastructure and bandwidth requirements that you mentioned. Suddenly you have so much content to stream to small devices and you have to get that information as fast as you can. 4G is just not enough. If you want to have like a really cool kinda immersive experience, 5G is obviously better, but again, like not every place have 5G rural areas. Sometimes they just need to wait the update. But the minute you have satellite internet or just that kind of coverage that comes from space, there you go. Suddenly everyone is cloud connected and also on the go, if I'm flying somewhere or I'm in a spacecraft, suddenly I'm still able to connect without having, you know, a a just a 5g node somewhere around me.

And the third thing is kind of the interface. So if I'm literally flying on a plane, if I want to instantiate, like I still wanna, you know, work on the go, I can instantiate through AR and VR multiple screens, endless amount of screens and kinda still work in a confined space. Specifically in industrial use case. If you're like that like thinking of like astronauts in the Space station in Space Station for example, yeah, having suddenly a virtual room that is endless, that you're not constrained by your actual physical space, that you can basically accomplish so many tasks on this kind of invisible computer. I think that's huge. I think that's like a, a no-brainer. An application like that will have to happen. I I definitely see kind of the astronauts of the future or maybe the present utilizing kind of ar vr interfaces to perform their job better or even train, you know, that kind of VR immersiveness is definitely has to be kind of utilized for simulations. And then if you want to train astronauts or even civilians who wanna go to space, how will that feel and kind of make that experience more palatable? I think, I think VR is the way to go.

Chad Anderson:

Sure. And AR is an excellent example of an application that's enhanced by global connectivity from satellite communications is higher bandwidth and lower latency improve streaming sustainability. You know, like real time zero latency is essential for ar vr. The humans have a very low tolerance for, for latency in, in immersive environments like that, right? So several companies are working to solve this from an infrastructure perspective. You know, probably chief among them is SpaceX and their Starling satellites blanking the earth with high bandwidth, low latency. But I wanted to touch on this cuz what you are doing also seems essential. You know, you're allowing developers to manage and deliver AR content even in locations with limited bandwidth and high latency and you're able to do by enabling content delivery management services that are tailored for lightweight 3D development experiences, right?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, a thousand percent. So if a company like SpaceX again blinks the world with kind of connectivity and kind of the, the kind invisible infrastructure on our end, it's all about the kind of optimization of content. So it's one thing to have the best infrastructure but we can actually do better. So we can take a file that's really, really large, compress that so it'll work so it'll stream faster. We do that for 3D models all the time. So again, you can upload a 3D model but the file size is really, really large. We'll create different versions of that file. So basically poly reduce that, those polygons on the 3D file create different variants and then stream them dynamically based on your network productivity. So if you are using the, you know, highest bandwidth best connection, you get the actual full file. But if you're in, if you're in a location that the internet isn't that good, well actually send a file that is gonna of poly reduced by 50%.

It's not that noticeable but it is take, you know, it takes a toll on the device that you're trying to render the asset and these concepts of like content optimization under the hood, I think it's something that is something that we kind of expect to happen seamlessly. If you think of video stay, if you watch a video and your internet connectivity isn't that good, what happens drops the frame rates reduces quality, but these things just happen and, and you kind of accept that. So in 3D, again what is the equivalent in, in our cases if I want to you know, stream the, the 3D model, the entire city of New York to the palm of my hand, do I actually have to see, you know, every cab, every window? No that content can be kind of removed or optimized or processed on the cloud and then based on my use case I can actually get the right content to stream. So I think that's also kind of really, really smart. Not just having the infrastructure there and make sure that is optimized but also the content delivery itself needs to optimize and that's what we do best.

Chad Anderson:

Yeah, beautiful. Okay. And then so I wanna dive into the interface a bit deeper. You know in, we've written again about AR in our GPS playbook and our geo playbook, it's an area that we think is really underpinned and enabled by a lot of, of space technology and then combining with computer vision to enable this sort of next level precision positioning and and placement. But in all of our thinking and our, in our writeups, we've always said that, you know, sort of AR is waiting for its iPhone moment and there's this quote from Apple's C o Tim Cook back in 2017 when he was talking about AR and he said, I regard it as this big an idea like the smartphone, the smartphone's for everyone. We don't have to think about the iPhone is about a certain demographic or country or vertical market. It's for everyone. I think AR is that big, it's huge, you know, and, and Apple was expected to come out with their headset in 2023. There was a ton of anticipation around it and you know on June 5th they announced it and you know, they have proclaimed that the era of spatial computing is here. I'm curious, you know, it seems like this is the iPhone moment for AR and and and mixed reality. What do you think is that, is that an overstatement or or what?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, well I definitely agree. I think the fact that it's like from all companies, apple is the one kind of announced is the kind of high end AR headset kind of brings that the market is important. Like they are the kind of, you know, market standard when it comes to hardware and consumer hardware specifically. I think a lot of like when kind of medic created their headsets, which I love, you have that kind of question mark, will consumers buy it? And when Apple releases hardware they have a very loyal fan base that will basically buy. So I think that's a really, really good kinda sign for the industry that hey, this is literally the next iPhone. The good thing about that headset specifically is also again, like kind of we see the price point is really high at this point, but it has a kind of pro, you know, kind pro label on it.

So which means okay, we're also getting a non-pro version soon. And we'll have something that kind of consumers will be able to easily buy. I'm super excited about this. Like the thing the minute they kinda introduce that, they also introduce a lot of developer tools and we already have all these kinda integration with their specific file formats, which is I think is great. So specifically because it's Apple, I'm really, really helpful that they know how to do user interfaces, right? They know how to do hardware right? And specifically consumer hardware. So if we are looking for that kind of moment for a lot of people to buy into, like ar, vr headsets, this is it. And I think they did like a really, really good work on their product launch. I think that was like a masterclass and like launching a product and also did it did really well kind of differentiate themselves and METAS headsets.

So METAS headsets are kind of really VR all about immersion and playfulness and kind of sports for Apple. You didn't see that like in their videos it's usually like a person sitting down. It's a lot of ar it's a lot of kind of utility versus immersion. A lot of things that kinda integrate in the real world conferencing, which just think speaks, speaks to kind of the core to the difference between AR and vr. So AR is about utility VR is about immersion and these are just different use cases. The cool thing from my perspective is that, you know, they both need the cloud solution and they both utilize CD content. So I'm kind of agnostic

Chad Anderson:

<Laugh>. That's great. I agree. I mean it's a beautiful piece of hardware. The release was fantastic. You know, I'm, I'm looking at at some of the consumer tech leading voices out there that, that try new, new hardware and give you a sort of run a rundown on what it was like to experience it. And you know, I hear people using words like it was, this is the closest thing that I've ever felt to magic, which is pretty exciting when you think about it. And so all this is getting me really excited and I watched the demo a couple of times and the thing that stood out the most to me was you've got this immersive experience and this incredible headset and most of the content is 2d. They're focused on reliving memories and connecting and entertainment. And most of these are, they're showcasing 2D websites. They're showcasing a 2D movie screen with some, you know, great enhancements and ability to sort of bring it into your space, but it's really all 2D content. And you know, as as I was thinking about having this conversation with you, I was just like, from your perspective, how important will it be to share 3D rather than 2D content? Cause it sort of feels like the hardware is leading here.

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah. Oh I love it. So, so specifically if you look at their example from the share memory, so that's actually 3d. So the, the headset itself has all these kind of infrared scanners and the LIDAR scanner very similar to the one that you have on your iPhone today. And that basically, that's why they call it like a kind of memory capture cause it will have that depth perception. It wouldn't be just like a 2D video. It's basically recapturing that kind of scene in 3D and be able to kind of replay that in 3d. We see a lot of apps like that do like kind of kind of 3D spatial capture. So that's what, that's like what's gonna kind of be, they have another thing that if you kind of turn the headset towards you, you'll be able to kind of generate that persona or basically a 3D avatar.

But that is basically your headsets generating a 3D model of you based on your characteristics. So there's already stuff there, they kinda, if you look closely, there's a lot of kind of 3D content there, which makes me super excited. And from kind of dev, the developers listening in, they actually added this kind of HTML tag that every 3D model that you have on your website, if it uses that kind of HTML tag and kind of has that file specific platform, you'll be able to almost like drag and drop into your space in 3d. So I think they hinted a lot of that. And again, if you kind of look closely, you do see that 3D content there. But yeah, marketing wise, I think they have to kind of focus on what we have today. Like videos are everywhere, images are everywhere and their existing devices know how to generate images and videos really well. So like they want to kind of tie that in. But I think the fact that like every iPhone today has a LIDAR scanner, which is basically a 3D kind of depth scanner, it's like, it's unbelievable. And I think back in the day people didn't kind of realize why, and now I think it's clear because they wanna make every device kind of, you know, like part of that kind of spatial computing thesis.

Chad Anderson:

I've just got my imagination going here and I'm thinking about, you know, wearing the headset and looking at a 2D website with maybe some 3D elements in it. But do you have an opinion on where websites go from here in an era of spatial computing? You know, is it, it's not just gonna be a whole bunch of text on a page, right? It's gonna be much more interactive and I would guess a lot more 3D content.

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, so I'll use opportunity to plug in echo's website. If you go to echo3d.com you'll actually see how we utilize 3D models inside the 2D webpage and it's really cool, really immersive. And then if you open that website and kinda Apple headset, you'll be able to kind of drag and drop those 3D assets that exist on the webpage and bring them to your space. And I think that that could be like a really cool use case of if we talk about like industrial use cases. So someone reviews a website or just a 2D screen and that screen has let's say a 3D model for spacecraft and then you wanna just literally drag and drop that out into reality, see it in 3D, experience it, review it. I think that kind of seamless pipeline will be something that we're gonna see more and more of that we have this kind of blend between kind of existing 2D interfaces to 3D interfaces.

Chad Anderson:

Hmm, fascinating. Okay. And another area that I wanted to ask you about is generative AI. It is revolutionizing tech across every sector. Curious how your, the developers that are on your platform, you know, how are they leveraging this for content creation? You know, is generative AI good or or bad for your business?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah it's definitely great. I mean the fact we, again, because we focus on infrastructure and, and kind of network optimization, we don't do content creation and we're actually super excited by all these kind of companies that are emerging and all these kind of people who are creating all these generative AI applications that allow you to create content. And for us it's the best thing. Like the more you ways you have to create content, the better. Cuz that means I have more content to process, optimize and store in the cloud. So the more the merrier a hundred percent. And what's interesting here in this technology, we're actually seeing a bunch of kind of new clients actually that are generative AI companies that need training data. And we at echo, we have so much data, so many 3D models on the cloud that are basically user generated or people store it, something you can use a lot of that, well not the use like the, not the user generated one was like a lot of the kinda assets that we have on storage as training data cuz you need to kind of figure this out.

Where do you get a huge collection of 3D models trained on echo is is basically that. So that's really interesting as well. And because we have this, again, BirdEye view of all the use cases, we have collections of, you know, assets that are suited for gaming, assets that are suited for e-commerce and then you kind of train your models on that. Again, I'm drinking the Kool-Aid. I think it's great. I think the intersection, if you like AI and 3D is a given and the more content creation tools out there, if it's AI or not, it's, it's great.

Chad Anderson:

Yeah. Okay. Look, you just am thinking about the competitive landscape here for echo3d, you know, who else is doing this? It sort of seems like you would be, you know, we mentioned the big tech companies early on. Do you bump up against them? Are they competitors or collaborators? You know, are there any new entrants? You know, how do you think of the, the, the competitive landscape given its sort of primordial nature of, of mixed reality right now?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, so there's definitely companies out there that will provide you with some kind of cloud solution for 3D, but with them you kind of have to use their platform, their camera, their smart camera, their game engine, their render. And at echo we don't do that. Like we don't force you to be vendor locked to anything. You can use echo with any platform including other competitors and still get that kind of cloud back in. So I think specifically the big ones you're seeing everyone is trying to kind of create basically the next iPhone. Like Meta wants you to use their headset, apple wants you to use their headset. Even Amazon has Sumerian, which is gonna be competitor to game images like Unity and Unreal. But they want you to use that and not that. And my mentality at Echo here is we don't bet on the horse, we bet on the track, I don't care which one you use, our cloud infrastructure connects to all of them and it just works seamlessly.

And if you wanna port your content from Apple to Meta or from Meta to Amazon or Amazon, you can do that. And I think that's kind of our kind of biggest smoke, that kind of interoperability kind of cross platform features that these companies won't basically directly create. Like Apple won't try to, you know entice you to build applications for them at Quest and vice versa. But at Echo, again, we allow you to have that kind of porting between devices because everything is on the cloud, which I think is great and it's something that we expect from 2D content. You can upload any image and it'll work on any browser and this works and all these browsers can compete. So we're basically, you know, doing the same strategy here.

Chad Anderson:

It'll certainly accelerate things and make it easier for, for people to build applications. So that's, that's great for all of us that wanna see this, this future realized in addition to the, the syndicate of investors that I mentioned earlier, you've got some strategics on your cap table, you know Qualcomm Ventures. Yeah. What do you think they saw in you? Was it, was it that, that they just want more content, more applications built using their, using their chips?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, so Qualcomm is a fantastic example of an amazing partner at Echo. So the fact that they are the leading chip for AR/VR headset, like literally every AR/VR headset except for the Apple one uses them. Every Meta, Quest uses like their chipset is phenomenal. So one is that, that they are providing the hardware and they're pushing kind of the creation of AR/VR devices and we're doing kind of software to connect them all. But they also have a, like a really, really interesting software play which ties into what we said about location based experiences. They have the Snapdragon Spaces SDK, which basically a spa, kinda a spatial SDK, they can kind of build location based experiences. So literally put, you know, a persistent model on the right side of the room and that will stick in that room, in that specific location because they have that kind of computer vision.

And cloud anchoring kind of capabilities and the partnership there is great cuz then, okay, I can have something, you know, at the, at the end of the kinda edge of the room, but like, what is that thought? Something like how do I decide what thing goes where and that's where Echo comes in and then you kinda match an asset on the cloud to that specific location and so on and so forth and manage it, kinda optimize that. So I think it's both kind of the software and hardware component, but we're very, very lucky to have them kind of strategically invest because again, they're such a huge champion of this industry. They even announced this 100 million Metaverse fund and when I saw that I was like, oh my God, like this is, this is a big deal. We were actually the first check in that in that kind of fund, so that was also really great. But they're amazing partners. I think the fact that like, again, you see all these big players in the industry, if it's again, Apple, Meta from like the software hardware perspective or Qualcomm, which is again the underlying chip set, it's just great news. Like it, it really provides a really positive outlook on the future of AR/VR.

Chad Anderson:

Certainly. So you've got a great foundation that you've built a great group of stakeholders around you. Thinking about the future and where we go from here, you know, how how big do you think this opportunity is for echo3D and you know, did you think about it did a couple months ago before Apple's announcement and, and now?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, well now I guess from day one for me is like we're building the new infrastructure for this kind of new internet. That's why I kind of prefaced when I have talked about, I I was like the AWS for 3D, that kind of web services specifically for 3D, I think it's as, as big as that today. Literally every third click goes through some Amazon server that, that's what I inspired to have for echo. That like every content, every 3D file goes through our pipeline and then it goes to any headset, any platform, any device anywhere in the world. And the more time passes we're just seeing, you know, more and more devices, more and more horses joining that race on that track that we're trying to build.

Chad Anderson:

So what's next? What are the key priorities for echo3D going forward?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, now it's just bringing more and more people into the fold. We're seeing all these kind of new industries emerging and all these new use cases for 3D and we just need to make sure that we're ready and there and kind of allowing them to use Echo at scale. So just that basically that's like bringing me more and more people to use our cloud solution and also kind of continuously evangelizing the space. I mean every time there's kind of this arms race right now, like, you know, building the next iPhone. So we need to make sure that our cloud integrates with everything. So that's what we did with the Apple One. Like on day one, we already have integrations to their file formats, but you know, I, I expect more and more hardware to kind of come about and for us to have to kinda make sure that we integrate and then do exactly what you described, kinda this porting porting between applications from this one to that headset and so on and so forth.

Chad Anderson:

Let's do our part to help people find you. You mentioned your website earlier. How else can listeners learn more about echo3D?

Alon Grinshpoon:

Yeah, so definitely check out our website, echo3D.com. We're also on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, like all the big ones just look for echo3D and yeah, and, and definitely another cool thing that you can do is you can actually have this kind of free tier that you can register right now and start playing around with it build applications that they mentioned. We made sure that you can kind of deploy 3D content in 15 minutes or less. So I definitely challenge like people who are listening to this to build something cool, like try, play around with it, register to echo, get a free account and start playing with 3D and kind of think how 3D can kind of disrupt my industry and kind of what I'm working on and how I can inject 3D content into the things I'm working on basically.

Chad Anderson:

That's great. Anything else that you wanted to cover that we didn't get to?

Alon Grinshpoon:

No, this is great. I mean, I'm really, really thankful that you had me on. I think the kind of space angle is obviously very, very interesting and very important. When you did your book launch, you talked about a bunch of have your book right here. You talk about a lot of things around the kinda space industry, but basically just blew my mind, like low orbit and a lot of things about location based things. I was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. Like this is finally, I'm hearing someone talking about like the kind of needed infrastructure for AR or in like VR from like the, the actual connectivity perspective and I thought it was just amazing. So thank you for having me on and kinda talk about these things.

Chad Anderson:

Thanks for that. Yeah, I mean we certainly believe that that space technology is a, is a key important piece of all that. So, so thanks. Yeah, Alon, this was great to have you, great conversation. Thanks. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Alon Grinshpoon:

Thank you.

Chad Anderson:

Thanks for tuning into the Space Capital Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode. And if you're interested in learning more about investing in the space economy, I invite you to visit our website spacecapital.com where you can get access to more industry leading insights and learn how you can join the entrepreneurial space age.

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